The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,363

has the time or energy, and trying to spread our empathy that thinly would be an invitation to emotional burnout and compassion fatigue.73 The Old Testament tells us to love our neighbors, the New Testament to love our enemies. The moral rationale seems to be: Love your neighbors and enemies; that way you won’t kill them. But frankly, I don’t love my neighbors, to say nothing of my enemies. Better, then, is the following ideal: Don’t kill your neighbors or enemies, even if you don’t love them.

What really has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy as a circle of rights—a commitment that other living things, no matter how distant or dissimilar, be safe from harm and exploitation. Empathy has surely been historically important in setting off epiphanies of concern for members of overlooked groups. But the epiphanies are not enough. For empathy to matter, it must goad changes in policies and norms that determine how the people in those groups are treated. At these critical moments, a newfound sensitivity to the human costs of a practice may tip the decisions of elites and the conventional wisdom of the masses. But as we shall see in the section on reason, abstract moral argumentation is also necessary to overcome the built-in strictures on empathy. The ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary. Empathy, like love, is in fact not all you need.

SELF-CONTROL

Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, Odysseus had himself tied to the mast, the grasshopper sang while the ant stored food, and Saint Augustine prayed “Lord make me chaste—but not yet,” individuals have struggled with self-control. In modern societies the virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have tamed the blights of nature most of our scourges are self-inflicted. We eat, drink, smoke, and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons, and become addicted to heroin, cocaine, and e-mail.

Violence too is largely a problem of self-control. Researchers have piled up a tall stack of risk factors for violence, including selfishness, insults, jealousy, tribalism, frustration, crowding, hot weather, and maleness. Yet almost half of us are male, and all of us have been insulted, jealous, frustrated, or sweaty without coming to blows. The ubiquity of homicidal fantasies shows that we are not immune to the temptations of violence, but have learned to resist them.

Self-control has been credited with one of the greatest reductions of violence in history, the thirtyfold drop in homicide between medieval and modern Europe. Recall that according to Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process, the consolidation of states and the growth of commerce did more than just tilt the incentive structure away from plunder. It also inculcated an ethic of self-control that made continence and propriety second nature. People refrained from stabbing each other at the dinner table and amputating each other’s noses at the same time as they refrained from urinating in closets, copulating in public, passing gas at the dinner table, and gnawing on bones and returning them to the serving dish. A culture of honor, in which men were respected for lashing out against insults, became a culture of dignity, in which men were respected for controlling their impulses. Reversals in the decline of violence, such as in the developed world in the 1960s and the developing world following decolonization, were accompanied by reversals in the valuation of self-control, from the discipline of elders to the impetuousness of youth.

Lapses of self-control can also cause violence on larger scales. Many stupid wars and riots began when leaders or communities lashed out against some outrage, but come the next morning had reason to regret the outburst. The burning and looting of African American neighborhoods by their own residents following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, and Israel’s pulverizing of the infrastructure of Lebanon following a raid by Hezbollah in 2006, are just two examples.74

In this section I will examine the science of self-control to see if it supports the theory of the Civilizing Process, in the same way that the preceding section examined the science of empathy to see if it supported the theory of the expanding circle. The theory of the Civilizing Process, like Freud’s theory of the id and the ego from which it was derived, makes a number of strong claims about the human nervous system, which we will examine in turn. Does the brain really contain competing systems for impulse